Together we must be stronger – Heritage leader

The leader of the opposition Heritage party has declared his intention to participate in the upcoming presidential election as an ordinary citizen in Armenia. Speaking at the party’s congress on Saturday, Raffi Hovhannisyan called for efforts for being unanimous to realize national goals. “Together with you, I form part of the collective team, whose flesh and blood is still to unite into a single body,” he said. The meeting, held in Yerevan’s Armenia Marriot hotel, was attended by teh 115 delegates of the party, of who 106 unconditionally expressed an unconditional support to the Heritage leader’s presidency plan. Addressing Armenia’s foreign and domestic policy challenges, Hovhannisyan particularly focused on the Armenia-Russia relations. “It is necessary to revise the relations with Russia. It has to say no to the vertical of the past and yes – to the real relations based on mutual interests,” he said. Hovhannisyan later spoke of the 100th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, noting that the problem has to find a solution by 2015. In that context, he particularly stressed the role of Armenia’s national policies. “It should be either no precondition or all the preconditions now. It is important to put forward the Armenian nation’s preconditions at the moment.” He then addressed the Armenian army, calling for maximum efforts to rule out soldiers’ peacetime deaths. The politician also stressed the importance of developing the partnership between Armenia and the Diaspora. “They must be entitled to participate in Armenia’s domestic life, and in the building of future,” he noted. At the end, he called on the crowd to be active in the upcoming presidential election. “Our country faces alienation; an Armenian has been estranged from his own land. There a kind of indifference and fatalism, and that creates the abyss which now exists between the civil society and the political processes. This has to be overcome,” he said, calling for an immediate action to work towards the future. Read more…(327 words)